Your Vacation Policy Could KillYour Startup. Here’s Why.

Most vacation policies lead to burnout and unhappy teams. Here’s another way.

It’s almost silly to say that “hard work is important.”

It’s not just important.

Relative to just about everything else in success—strategy, tactics, networking—hard work (done smartly) is everything.

If you work hard every single day, and apply the right strategies and tactics to that hard work, you will win eventually.

If you have the best strategies and tactics in the world, and don’t work very, very hard to execute on them, you will lose.

Every. Single. Time.

Every successful person that I know—and, I’m willing to bet, that you know—got there only after a lot of hard work.

And that’s something that we can all learn from.

But something that people who have bought into the religion of hard work—even many who are successful—struggle with is balance.

Working hard, but taking time off to relax, recharge, and do other things that make them happy.

I’ve certainly struggled with it, and I continue to do so. Having a baby a few months ago has certainly helped.

But every year around this time, as folks take off for the holidays, I’m reminded at just how important it is to do something that seems sacrilegious in far too many startup circles: take a damn vacation.

Why Every Business Needs to Encourage Taking Time Off

Vacation is a touchy subject, especially in the States, and paying lip service to it isn’t enough.

Employers tell their teams that they should feel free to go on vacation, but never do so themselves.

Employees are scared of looking bad, or feel guilty increasing the workload of their coworkers by taking time off.

But both of these excuses are, to put it frankly, bullshit.

Ernst & Young did a study that found that for every 10 additional hours of vacation time their employees took, their performance ratings from supervisors improved by 8 percent.

The Benefits Of Vacation

At the same time, overworking without breaks takes a huge toll on our health, making us sick in all kinds of ways.

And it hurts companies, too. One study found that employees’ lack of sleep—a curse I fall victim to every time we start to work too much—cost companies more than $63 billion in productivity each year.

To me, there’s no doubt about it: the dangers of not taking time off from work massively outweigh the (diminishing) benefits of putting in those extra two weeks every year. It’s hard to remember to take time off, especially at startups, but it’s also critical to your success as a business.

How We Make It Work as aSmall Remote Team

We all take time off from work—we have to—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with challenges.

The toughest thing about making vacations work in a small team is that we don’t have a lot of overlap in our roles; we’re all critical.

If our only designer leaves for a week, well, nothing is getting designed that week. We can’t simply step into each other’s shoes.

There are three things that we’ve found work best to ensure that vacations don’t end up bringing the company to a halt:

1) Building Vacation Time Into Our Roadmap

Realistic roadmapping is one of the biggest struggles for almost any startup.

Until your team has been working together for quite some time, almost everything takes longer than you think it will. And that’s with everyone working at full productivity.

But when an employee goes on vacation—or even has a sick day—things can get bad, fast.

One of the most important resource planning lessons we’ve learned is to budget liberally for vacation time and sick days, so that they never come as a surprise.

Our weekly project plans look less ambitious than they did a year ago, but we hit our milestones far more consistently.

Takeaway:Make sure that you’re accounting for time off in your project planning. It’ll avoid painful stalls and missed milestones when team members get sick or go on vacation.

2) Frontloading the Work

Another critical consideration: don’t just budget for less work to get done when a team member is gone.

You also need to budget for less work the week before a vacation, as the employee will need to spend time doing work that minimizes the number of tasks that get pushed onto teammates.

Take this blog, for example: generally, after a post is written, I’ll work with our designer to build the images and code the post. Then I’ll write the email that gets sent to our subscribers, load that into Campaign Monitor and queue it for sending.

Blog Workflow

Before I left, I spent extra time doing those tasks (and scheduling the email sends) so that nobody else would have to. In fact, just about the only thing that nobody else can do—answer my emails and comments—was all that was left to do during the time I was away, and that was what I spent that hour of work doing.

With the work frontloaded and the right systems in place, the company still ran with minimal disruption to everyone else’s workflow.

Takeaway:Think about what needs to be done while you’re away, and do your best to minimize what gets left to your teammates. By doing the extra work up front, you let the company run as seamlessly as possible without you.

3) Hiring the Right People

I’ve talked a number of times about how important hiring the right people is, especially for a remote team.

When it comes to handling workload and time off, having the right team is critical.

As a remote team, we can’t babysit each other. So just as important as it is to hire people who can “be their own CEO” and get their work done, it’s also important to hire people who know how to manage their workload without getting overworked, and who already deeply understand the benefits (for the whole team) of taking time off.

If someone on the team can’t handle the combination of remote autonomy and startup craziness, they’ll burn out fast. Burnouts lead to lost productivity and stalled progress, and we all know where that leads.

Takeaway: Hiring the right people is important for so many reasons, but keeping your team sane and healthy is a big one. Make sure new hires know how valuable time off is, and how to manage their workload to ensure that they don’t burn out.

How to Apply This to Your Business

I’m not the best at “turning off.”

Often—like today—the bags under my eyes are proof of that.

But it’s something that I’m actively working on, and it’s why this month, I’m pledging to shut off for a week.

I hope that this post inspires you to do—and push your team to do—the same.